Debbie Does Drivel

As I sit, here in my office, I have the door leading to the patio open, and I can hear the world go by.
In this particular case, there is a "car repair" place abutting my company's property and they are responsible for the highest-decibel output of sound I've ever heard.
I put "car repair" in quotes, because I think there's something else going on there. I'm not sure what (not like the "fish store" below us, who apparently have a clientele of all young men in big trucks who feel an urge to buy fish every Friday afternoon. So overwhelming an urge, it seems, that they will line up around the block for such a fish-buying privilege), but it's auditorily rich and sometimes annoying.
This day, I've listened to a jingle jangle of aural delights. Sometimes, I tune out the multi layers of sound -- which can act much like white noise -- but other times, I hear each and every noise as perfectly pitched as if it were right outside my door.

Which it is.

In no special order, this is what I'm hearing:
--the refrain of the "Fur Elise." In a repetitive electronica format.
--the metallic screech of a saw.
--the barest suggestion of a phone ringing, somewhere deep in the bowels of the "car repair" place.
--glass breaking
--ball bearings or some such thing rolling around
--an obnoxious roaring
--airplanes overhead (this could be to drop off the fish store's latest "shipment")
--a clicking
--a clacking

Taking a look outside, I see one young man assembling things (sorry, can't be more specific) in a yard which also holds about 16 cars, all in disrepair. Except the thing is, they're not repairing them. They're taking a door off here, a steering wheel there, and stripping the vehicle of all its innards.

(Ooooo. An F-18 just winged by!)

Wait, now there's a deep, whirring sound going on, a lot like a giant blender...
Must look....

(brief pause)...

Well, there's one guy standing out there, looking down at something (sorry, can't be more specific) and he caught me staring at him.

They're on to me.

Hope they don't get the fish guys involved.

Men can be so predictable!
I went with my hoo ha, bling bling friend for a walk last night and we ended at a picnic bench doing lunges on the seats.
Well, this late-40-ish was on his cell phone talking loudly so everyone could hear, and casting backward glances our way, as if doing lunges right behind him may offer a crotch shot or something.
So, my hoochie pal says, "We're here for your entertainment," and he lecherously grins and says, "All right!" and gets off the phone and proceeds to just watch us do lunges.
Needless to say, it was uncomfortable. So, I tell him, "We start charging after the second rep," and he's all like, "I'll pay!" and we're just all "Get a life!" and he's just standing there staring at our lunges.

What a pogohead.

Cost of crapbox in as north of San Diego as you get and still say you're not in Oregon.:
$360,000

Cost of piece of shit house with strange, narrow, winding, dark, extra room next to the garage and yellow linoleum everywhere, including the kitchen counters:
$480,000

Cost of somewhat nicer (but still crappy) home in piece of shit neighborhood:
$499,000

Cost of not living in San Diego:
Priceless

There was this one year (1982-1989) where I sat in front of the TV watching HBO constantly. I have such fond memories of those times. Me and my 20 extra pounds lounging on our tweedy couch (years 1982-86) and black leather sofa (years 1986-1989) watching two-hour segment after two-hour segment of sucky suckiness. Here, as part of my 20-year anniversary of when it all started, is my list of those movies:

--The Pirate Movie (the faux fish song sequence is the BEST) with Kristy McNichol
--Teen Witch (I LOVED this freaking movie. The rap sequence is A1 prime.)
--Just One of the Guys. Just check out this dialogue.
--Grease II. I probably still know all the words to all the songs by heart. (He's a co-o-o-l rider, anybody? Probably not.)
--Secret Admirer. One of the best of the worst.
--DC Cab. Bwah!

These were all two or three notches below the "Say Anything"s and "16 Candles"s' of the time period. They were idiotic and so very stupid. But I loved them more than I could ever hope to love the "Freddy Got Fingered"s and "Corky Romano"s of today.

Happy anniversary my friends.

SO, I was just in this meeting.
And I told my superior that I needed an anti-glare screen on my computer since I'm experiencing bad eye strain.
He tells me I have such a screen.
I say no I don't.
He tells me to shut my blinds and turn off my office lights.
I tell him it's my computer screen, not the ambiant lighting in my office that's creating a problem.
He begrudgingly says I can order an anti-glare screen.

What the hell?
Yeah, maybe a blind and incapacitated employee is your idea of fun, but it's not mine, buddy.

I actually like this guy, but he ALWAYS has to be right and have the last word, that it drives me crazy.
So, he will go to the trouble to argue with me over needing an anti-glare screen just to take the opposite side and argue it with the outcome being he is right.

Sometimes, I'll say, "So, the Cold Fusion custom tag should be saved in the library folder."
And he'll counter with, "NO! The tag that is Cold Fusion custom-generated should be saved in the template folder!"
And I'll say, "Right. The template folder IS the library folder."
And he will then say, "Well, then! We should re-name the library folder the template folder to avoid confusion."
And I come back with, "Yeah. That's the way it was until last week when you decided it shouldn't be that way anymore just because you wanted to exercise your folder titling privileges in some bizarre power struggle. Shall I knock you senseless now or later?"

He does this often. He will ask me to do something and then two weeks later act completely befuddled that I ever did this thing in the first place. And when I'm like, "You told me to do this, butt infection," he acts like surely I had to have misheard him because he would never have ordered such a task.
And because he always has to be right, he will never ever admit his mistake. Even when I wave his e-mail or note in his face asking me to do what he is now saying I should never have done.

The last vestiges of my soul are slowly seeping from my flesh...

Her name is Rebecca. I try to visit her once on week, on Sundays. She lives nearby, in a one-room apartment complex made up of active seniors.
She has only one chair outside her door, so people stopping by don't settle in and start endlessly talking about cancers, polyps, and liver spots.
She rarely invites someone in for a visit. She prefers her own company to that of people who feel sorry for themselves.
She tells me that a one-hour chat is enough. After that, it's time to go.

Once, she made me rice and curried vegetables. That time, I stayed for almost three hours, her time limit for guests forgotten.
We talked about her four husbands, her life in San Francisco with Hilton, a musician whom she loved very much. She told what she saw at Haight Ashbury firsthand. She tells me how she came to be a Christian Scientist, and that logic will save you.

She reads only non-fiction, yet indulges me by reading my book-in-progress out loud, one chapter each visit.

Once a week, she sends in a column to a local Macon, Georgia newspaper. The last column she wrote spoke of a house abandoned by a friend's family in the 1920s. The family just left the house one day, with all of its innards intact. Furniture, food, bed linens, everything stayed in the house while the family moved 50 miles away. Rebecca's friend talked about this house for decades, but couldn't remember how to get there, as it was in the middle of the woods. One day about 40 years ago, when Rebecca was 47, her friend and several others, went on a wild goose chase to find the house. They just drove into the woods, and it all came back to Rebecca's friend. She pointed out the tiny dirt roads they'd need to take to get to the house. About an hour later, they were snaking up the driveway. The woman still had the key to the door, a key she'd carried with her for many dozens of years.

When they'd all made their way inside, Rebecca's friend saw that everything was the exact same as she'd remembered it. Dishes on the table, beds unmade, curtains closed. Nothing had been touched.
Except, when she looked out the window into the yard, she noticed a dogwood tree was missing.

Later, after Rebecca had read me this story, it was time for me to go. She had paid $3 for a hotdog lunch, being served in the activity room. Normally, Rebecca dislikes these group functions, since they seem so child-like and silly, but she had decided to go this one time. Still, she tells me, she'll only keep one chair outside her door.

My heart wakes me every night.
About two hours after I drift off to sleep, I wake up suddenly, needing (but failing) to catch my breath, my heart rate through the roof.
This happens every single evening.
Not wanting to keep Kev up with my deep gasping choking attempts at air, I wander into the living room and try to regain my breath to the soft soothing sounds of David Letterman or Conan or the Abflex infomercial.
Sometimes I flip the computer on, initiating a search for "why am I dying?"

Maybe I'm in deep REM sleep before snapped into consciousness, dreaming some horrible thing which I forget instantly.
Perhaps I'm burying something awful in my subconscious that plays itself out via my anxious physical reaction.
(But I know from panic attacks and this doesn't fit the bill.) (Though, I did hear I've stuffed the memory of a particularly horrible plane ride from years ago...don't remember a thing about it or even taking the trip, yet the anxiety from it lingers.)
Or, could be I really am dying. Some myocarditis. Freakish pulse anomaly. Arrythmia.

Truly, I don't feel particularly panicky about anything -- any more so than my normal baseline hyper-anxiety -- so what's happening?

To boot, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I see things I wish I didn't.
Like, a few nights ago, when I traveled to the kitchen for some water, I spied an enormously chubby cockroach on the floor. Its girth exceeded your wildest imaginings. It knew I saw it, and that it was moments away from losing all its girth, when it tried to squeeze itself through a crack under the door. It so desperately attempted to push itself under the door jamb with these nervous sidelong glances at me, that I took instant pity on the thing. I let it live, bottom half poking from under the door, wedged halfway between dimensions.

That thing embodied my psyche. It as if we were one.
Except for the girth part.

[BigBody]

That's the thing about death.
You don't come back from it.
It's always got me: you can't return from death.
(Such a hard concept to grasp, like how did God get here? Nothing comes from nothing. But how did something come about from nothing?)
Oh well. It's simple really. Everyone feels that disbelief about death. The denial that the person you love really won't come back.

I felt it when my mom died. Afterward, I crawled next to her to feel anything that might be left of her self. But she really was gone. The people left behind feel that irrevocably and it's hard to describe to those who haven't been through it: but all vestige of the person who passed away went with them. The body seems like just the shell it is.

I felt it again this past weekend when we went to the wake and funeral of Kev's grandpa. The face, the hands, the arms, the clothes of the person are there, right there for you to see. But you don't feel it. You can't even -- for awhile -- picture the shy smile or the raspy laugh or the slow slow way this person used to open Christmas presents -- with a little pocket knife he always kept with him. Then, the teeny reminders and pictures come back to you, and you just can't believe that there's a finite amount of memories left of this person, and that is all.

Someone I respect once said that we are the waves on a vast ocean. The ocean is the absolute and the wave is a brief peak of individuality which rises, then returns to its source.
A small bit of comfort, I suppose.

Be still my heart. My pulsating, meaty, blood-dripping, sinewy, pulpy heart.
A heart that if it were featured in a horror flick would have been ripped, still beating, from my bony chest and eaten with gleeful abandon by a slashing, evil, killer-with-a-horrible-victimized-childhood-past.
This website completes me.

A friend of ours' son got engaged last week, and to celebrate, the bride-to-be's family and our friend's family dined at a fancy restaurant.
During dinner, the b-to-b's dad brought out a bottle of champagne he'd purchased 26 years ago in anticipation of this event. A glowing toast -- with tears -- ensued. It seemed the girl's family had been waiting for this day forever.
Then, a little later, a florist delivered 3 bunches of red roses to the table. One went to the future bride, one to her mom, and one to our friend.
Again, this had been planned far in advance of the engagement. In point of fact, it'd been engineered pretty much the day the girl was born.
I can't decide if I think this is cute or.......
cute-less.

THIS PAST WEEKEND, I:

Was watching a 1978 movie titled "An Unmarried Woman." To me, this movie was obscure and little-known. It played on the WE (Women's Entertainment) channel.
In the other room, Kevin viewed some show where they turned a Ford Explorer into a garbage truck. But this is not integral to the story.
Actually, there really is no story, so it's not integral that I point out the above is not integral.
What is notable, though, is that Kevin does not remember anything from anytime anyplace anyone anyhow.
He can't recall anyone he ever went to school with, teachers' names, what he did as a kid, years 18-30, or anything thereafter. We think the memory center of his brain may have been siphoned out during an alien abduction while a toddler.
At any rate, Kevin has no recollection of most things that happened last week. It really is that bad.
So, when, on his way to the kitchen last night, he asked me what I was watching, I replied sheepishly, "An Unmarried Woman," and he stated matter-of-factly, "Oh, with Jill Clayburgh," I understandably about rolled from my prone, couch-bound, pillow-lofted, blanketed, stretched-out position, onto the sharp edge of my distressed pine coffee table, which could have knocked me out, stealing from me my memory, so Kevin and I could then be cerebral-cortex-less drone twins.

Last week, I received a check from the State Tax Board of California for $945.00.
A letter accompanied the money, and stated that I'd miscalculated my 2001 return and had this money coming to me.
Well, the week before, I'd received a similar letter from the IRS, but this one told me I owed an additional $300. So, the $945 would come in handy.
But yet, my conscience gnawed. I've never ever had money returned to me from the state and not much had changed in those years past and 2001.
I knew there had to be a mistake. BUT, they had double-checked my return, and decided I was owed money.
So, I call them.
First time, they're not too interested in figuring out if there's an error. I hang up.
I still don't feel right.
I call again.
This time, a guy says, "well, if it says $2883 in Box Whatever, you're fine."
I check my return. It says "$2022" in the box. I bring this up on my third call.
Still, not much interest. The woman tells me that all my W-2s probably add up to $2883. I consider this. I only have one W-2. These people don't care to work this out. It's as if they're arguing with me to stop pushing, b/c they don't want to spend the time to figure it out.
I dream dreams of debt pay-offs, of buying the fine meats and cheeses I pass in the grocery store, of actually filling my tank all the way up with gas.
My karma hurts.
I call again.
I insist they correct the mistake.
Now, I have an extra $77 and the remaining $868 is on their way back to the State Board of California.
Am I really a good person or just chicken shit?
Of course, you may just call me stupid.

A Self-Professed Hypocrite's Point of View

Sometimes (translation: a lot), I feel something's wrong with San Diego.
When I first moved here from Chicago in 1986, I hated this place more than my dad hates small cars.
It was so artificial -- the palm trees looked plastic, the people too blonde, the ocean too sparkly. I wanted my environment cold and forbidding, like the Midwest in winter.
San Diego was all sizzle, but no steak.
I discovered this quickly.
Everyone seemed so concerned with appearances, they forgot the soul.
I'd go to a concert -- the silence from the crowd deafened me. No one was rocking! No one whooped and hollered. Same went for sporting events. It was like the San Diego Stepford Wives. Pretty faces. No emotion.
Or a parfait. The damn thing looks so good, but it's really just a bunch of tasteless air-tossed Cool Whip.

The people who subscribe to the notion of worthiness by virtue of car, house, hair, bod seem so vacant. And in San Diego, it's concentrated: it's a communal assurance that all it takes to make it is appearances, and it really doesn't matter what's inside.

Back then, I'd run around disappointed a lot. I couldn't locate anyone who thought beyond the day at the beach. Seemed like everyone my age I talked to were "going back to school at the community college, for the fourth time," or "taking some time off to play."

Why? My theory: it's too nice here. If the weather is perfect everyday, it breeds a sense of immediate gratification. A "it's so nice out, I can put off college another year while I hang with my friends at the beach/outdoor bar/boardwalk." It's a nice feeling of "all is right with the world," that eclipses uncomfortable thoughts of "I have to work toward a future." Why think of attending school for four years now? Let's enjoy today and think about that tomorrow!"
[ed. note: this is my everyday non-San-Diego-native line of thinking, but you are now getting very very sleepy, your eyelids are droopy, you do not remember anything said within brackets.]

In other parts of the country, it's freaking freezing, your ubiquitous butt has long ago froze and cracked off and sits on an icy sidewalk amidst other people's frost-bitten, frozen-off butts. You have no choice. What else are you going to do? You study. You plan for the future. You go to church. You develop things like family values. There's nothing else to do around these God-forsaken places. It's too sub-zero. Long wind-torn days are broken only by a three-month humid summer respite where we're all so happy to be warm we drink in pubs and have drunken street festivals and oh...are you people still here?

But like with anything, it's not all or nothing. A move back to Chicago, and a two-year stint in L.A. later, I'm back in San Diego. I've located some down-to-earth friends (and some not so much, but I try not to be too hard on them), realized San Diego is more involved with arts and culture these days, and mostly: that there are enough people from other parts of the country here now to take the Sand out of San Diego.

An Obtuse Analogy from my Friend Carolyn (circa 1992)

"Yeah, we broke up. It was like I was a McDonald's tray and there were still some fries left on it, but he just dumped the whole thing in the garbage. You know how you do? Just nonchalantly slide the whole thing in the trash with one hand under the tray because you don't want to touch the ketchup-smeared, crusty swinging garbage can door?"